Web Conferencing Tips, News, and Opinions

June 29, 2018

This is just a quick cross-posting alert. The online magazine "Indezine" was kind enough to invite me to contribute an article on their targeted field of PowerPoint presentations. I gave them my 'Top 5 Tips For Remote Presentation Design."

One of my tips is a suggestion that is often misinterpreted and sometimes generates controversy. I suggest aiming for an average of one slide change per minute during web presentations.

I always try to couch this in disclaimers that this is a rough cumulative average over the entire duration of your talk. Don't get hung up on making every slide fit exactly 60 seconds of scripting. The idea is there to avoid "too fast" or "too slow" slide changes. If you rapidly click through a succession of slides, it can overwhelm the ability of some web conferencing programs to stay synchronized for all audience members. People can get frustrated if they don't have time to take in your visual content.

On the other hand, you don't want to give remote attendees a chance to get bored with the visuals. Once they start looking elsewhere, you lose their full attention. Even if they keep listening to you, their retention rate goes down if they are playing solitaire or answering emails on their computer. Slide changes act as a way to refocus active attention back to your presentation, so you want to make use of that psychological assist.

Some presenters interpret my rule of thumb to mean: "Read long slides really quickly, so you can get through all that text in a minute." That is definitely not the intent! If you need to convey a lot of information, split it into successive smaller chunks so that you and your audience can focus on one nugget at a time. Each gets its own slide that carries full focus and attention. Then you move on to the next little piece of your recitation. You end up with the same total amount of data on your slides, but each slide becomes easier to take in, allows white space or room for a graphic to set it off, and lets you incorporate more slide changes to retain visual focus.

June 12, 2018

I worked on a client webinar today featuring an elementary school principal. She showed this picture of her students producing and broadcasting the daily school news video. The boy sitting next to the principal is telling the "joke of the day" while the girls monitor framing and check the outbound feed. the man is just documenting how the whole thing gets made, and is not a part of the process itself.

The picture really made me think. First, I marveled at the fact that these elementary students have a better technical setup than most business professionals who appear on video webinars or webcasts. The presenters have a simple background that does not distract the viewer's eye. The camera is slightly above the presenters' eye lines and has them properly framed. The video image is visible if needed, but is not directly in front of the presenters, so they don't keep trying to sneak a peek at their image and can instead maintain proper eye contact with the camera. The camera is far enough away to capture the full upper body of the presenters and still allow enough room to capture hand gestures or a little head and body movement.

Compare that with the usual webinar video taken from a business person's laptop computer, shooting up into their nostrils, with the ceiling featured as a background. The close proximity of the webcam means that perspectives are foreshortened and moving your hands even slightly toward the camera makes them appear gigantic. Any upper body motion moves you out of your tight closeup framing.

But more than this, I started thinking about what I would tell the students if I were invited to help them improve their presentation techniques. I would have to keep it very simple, concentrating on a few key fundamentals. You can't overwhelm a child just learning the basics of presenting.

If they kept developing their skills, they would have the opportunity to work on additional techniques, practicing vocal skills, projection, diction, scripting, on-camera behaviors, incorporation of graphics and other supporting materials, and so on. Over time, they would develop into better and better presenters - a skill that would help them throughout their lives in feeling comfortable in front of others, learning how to communicate effectively, and having the ability to effectively inform and influence other people. They should be able to look back on their early, primitive steps into this field of expertise and shake their heads wistfully… "I can't believe how bad I was! If I only knew then what I know now."

Which brings me to my key question for you… Do you ever shake your head wistfully and say "I can't believe how bad I used to be as a presenter. If I only knew then what I know now?" You should! Presentation skills are like any other learned skill set. You learn additional techniques over time, building on what you have assimilated and have become comfortable with. You feel capable of incorporating greater sophistication in using interactive techniques, working with supporting multimedia, or structuring your talk to make it more persuasive and useful for your audience.

I keep my old presentations archived. Some in PowerPoint form, some in script documents, some in audio or video recordings. I often look back through them to get ideas or pull out snippets I remember using in the past. I usually cringe at the quality of my past materials. But that is right and proper. If I'm no better now than I was then, what have I been doing with my career?

Athletes, opera singers, construction workers, and doctors all expect to keep learning, keep practicing, and keep improving their skills. But presenters too often feel that "this is good enough." I hope you will feel inspired to stay on a path to continual improvement as a presenter, learning and incorporating better practices for crafting your speeches, your materials, and your delivery. Enjoy the growth that lets you look back on your past efforts with the bittersweet smile of experience.

June 07, 2018

Ah, the age-old question. There isn't a presentation coach in the world who doesn't get asked how to combat nerves.

In almost every case, it's the wrong question to ask. MOST people are nervous speaking in front of groups. Many famous actors and singers have spoken openly about the fact that they get tremendous stage fright before going on stage. You may NEVER get to the point where you don't feel nervous.

So the real question needs to shift from "how do I avoid feeling nervous" to "how do I present effectively even though I feel nervous?"

Nobody ever wants to hear the best and most effective strategy. It's simple… You practice over and over and over until you know exactly what you are going to do, what you are going to say, how you are going to emphasize key points, when you are going to reference key data or visuals. Athletes refer to this as "developing muscle memory." A golfer trying to sink the winning putt on the last hole in front of a huge gallery (with millions more watching on television) is nervous as hell. He or she relies on letting the body complete the motions it has gone through time after time.

Actors, singers, and monologists rehearse and rehearse before you ever see them. That lets them go through the motions of their performance even though they might be shaking in fear before the curtain goes up.

The TEDx Talk page outlines a sample timeline for speakers that starts first rehearsals four months before the talk date! Two months out, rehearsals are bi-weekly. One month out, rehearsals are weekly. Then more rehearsals. Then more.

I will be the first to admit that this is overkill for all but the most critical of public performances. But the underlying concept is solid. The more comfortable you are with your content and how you present it, the less it matters that you happen to feel nervous. You can perform in the presence of nerves because you have developed "muscle memory" of your delivery. I remain astonished at how many webinar presenters fail to even do one complete word-for-word run through of their presentation before the public air date.

I want to clarify one important point in this analogy. You have an advantage over Adele or Barbra Streisand or Laurence Olivier (famous stage fright sufferers). You don't have to memorize every word you plan to say, every lyric of a song, every stage movement. Sure, work with a script in your early rehearsals if it makes you feel more comfortable. Then throw it away for your live presentation. Don't try to memorize your speech. You will forget something and it will throw you into a panic. Speak conversationally. You will know your topic, you will know what you wanted to say about it. You will remember some key phrases just by dint of having said them in your rehearsals. But you won't freeze up when you forget one word in the middle of a sentence.

But that's not what you were hoping for, is it? Rehearsals are too much work… Too boring… Too time-consuming. You are a busy person tapped to do one webinar. You just want a simple device - a trick to help settle the butterflies in your stomach. How about the old "visualize the audience in their underwear?" Does that work?

No, it doesn't.

I can only give you two pieces of "quick 'n dirty" advice. The first is well tested and proven in stressful situations of all sorts. Practice five minutes of regulated, intentional breathing before your presentation. Breathe in for at least four seconds. Hold for at least four seconds. Breathe out for at least four seconds. Hold for at least four seconds. Repeat. This has an incredible calming effect on the body.

The second piece of advice comes from "The King and I" by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Follow the lyrics from "Whistle A Happy Tune" and ask yourself how a brave and confident person would behave in this situation. Then fake it. Pretend you're calm and it often comes across as if you really are!

Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head erect And whistle a happy tune So no one will suspect I'm afraid

While shivering in my shoes I strike a careless pose And whistle a happy tune And no one ever knows I'm afraid

The result of this deception Is very strange to tell For when I fool the people I fear I fool myself as well

I whistle a happy tune And every single time The happiness in the tune Convinces me that I'm Not afraid

Make believe you're brave And the trick will take you far You may be as brave As you make believe you are

May 29, 2018

There are two common scenarios where PowerPoint fonts cause a problem in webinars:

1) Creating the PowerPoint on one computer and displaying it on another

2) Uploading the PowerPoint to a web conferencing product that converts and stores the slides in the conference room for display to participants

In both cases, you have the potential to see discrepancies in the text on slides. One of my clients creates their PowerPoints on a Mac. When I open their files on my Windows computer, the bullet symbols that they see as hyphens show up as little mailbox icons. I have to manually change the bullet symbol selection to get it back to a hyphen on Windows.

If a PowerPoint creator uses proprietary or non-system fonts, there is no telling what may happen when they ship the file to someone else. Even though PowerPoint gives creators a way to embed the fonts in the presentation, it still may not work. If PowerPoint can't find a font on your computer, it just changes the text to a different font for you, usually causing problems with incorrect line wrapping in the process. If the presentation doesn't look right on your screen, it won't look right when you use screen sharing to display it in your webinar!

Situation number 2 in my list is a more special-case scenario. Certain web conferencing products use an alternative to screen sharing for showing PowerPoint slides. You upload your PowerPoint file into the conference room and the software goes through a conversion step (usually turning it into a Flash or HTML5 "movie" internally - although you don't know that).

The PowerPoint may look fine on your computer… You have all the fonts installed, and everything shows up as expected. But when you try to display your slides in the conference, you see text converted to other fonts. That is because some of the most popular conversion algorithms have no way to pick up embedded proprietary fonts.

Fig 1: Fonts as they look in PowerPoint on my computer

Fig 2: The same slide uploaded and displayed in a web conferencing product

With that background behind us, we are ready to look at a "quick 'n dirty" brute force workaround when this happens to you and you can't think of any other way to solve your problems. This solution has a major caveat that you need to be aware of, but a lot of times it will save you in a crisis.

The short description is to save the presentation as a set of pictures, one for each slide. Then you create a new presentation composed of the slide pictures.

STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS

1) Open the PowerPoint on a computer that displays everything properly. Choose "File - Save As" and select the option for JPEG File Interchange Format (*.jpg). Check my notes farther down for an explanation of why this is your best choice.

2) When asked "Which slides do you want to export?" choose the button for "All Slides"

3) Designate a destination folder for the save. PowerPoint will create a series of files named slide1.jpg, slide2.jpg and so on.

4) Open a new PowerPoint file and make sure the slide aspect ratio is the same as your original (4:3 or 16:9). Add a bunch of blank slides… The same number as you had in your original.

5) On slide #1, choose the command to "Insert Pictures." Choose slide1.jpg from your save folder. Page down and repeat the process for each slide.

6) Save the new presentation. You are done. This version can be uploaded or shared through screen sharing on any other computer, with no chance of text getting replaced (since you have eliminated all text elements).

UPDATED May 29:Huge thanks to Chantal Bosse for suggesting a faster insert method for steps 4 and 5. Just use the "Insert Photo Album" command to insert all the pictures at once. You can avoid having to create blank slides and insert each slide picture separately.

IMPORTANT CAVEATS AND CONSIDERATIONS

This is a "frozen in time" version of your PowerPoint. You cannot make any last-minute edits and alterations to individual elements, since each slide has been flattened to a single picture.

You lose all slide transitions and animation effects from your original presentation. Each slide is just a static image. You can always add slide transitions back in the new file if desired.

Some "upload and convert" webinar tools reduce the resolution or image quality on pictures. Your mileage will vary. Make sure to test how it looks in your webinar program.

OTHER NOTES AND SUPPORTING DETAILS

Your current "view size" does not matter when you save your slides as pictures. Whether you are viewing at 40%, 100%, or 200%, the pictures are saved at the perfect size to fill a slide - 960x720 pixels for older 4:3 aspect ratio presentations, and 1280x720 for widescreen 16:9 presentations.

JPG gives you the best compromise of image quality vs file size. I tried tests with GIF, JPG, and PNG. GIF has noticeably lower image quality and a slightly larger file size than JPG. PNG may result in microscopically better image quality, but I am not convinced that it is not just expectation bias. I find myself squinting and asking myself if there is really a difference. And PNG files are close to three times larger than JPG. Your final presentation size will be noticeably different.

Inserting pictures into your new presentation will go a LOT faster if you add the Insert Pictures command icon to your Quick Access Toolbar. It's faster than using the keyboard shortcut of Alt+N, P. You can get very fast at "click icon, choose file, press page down."

May 22, 2018

Cisco just released a new ad for the rebranded Webex (as opposed to the previous WebEx) collaboration suite of products. Well, it SAYS it's for Webex… To my ears, it sounds like an ad for the concept of collaboration.

Advertising is a tricky business. You never know what will work until you try it, and a new ad may seem ineffective at first until viewed in the context of a larger ongoing campaign. But my take on this is that it sells the wrong value proposition to the wrong audience using the wrong arguments.

We can start with the obligatory carefully crafted sound bite issued by corporate marketing when a company introduces a new ad campaign. The Ad Age article quotes Cisco's chief marketing officer talking about their choice of spokesperson, 14-year-old Millie Bobby Brown from the TV show Stranger Things: "Millie's youth was a determinant in casting her. As we continue to keep the Cisco brand fresh and unexpected, Millie represents us in a new light to a new generation."

If Cisco is trying to appeal to a new generation, why are they attempting to sell the concept of collaboration as if it is a newly-minted idea that nobody has ever thought of before? The current generation has been collaborating online for their entire lives. They have never known a time when they didn't have immediate access to instantaneous two-way communication with every friend and colleague they have. It's a given, not an awe-inspiring paradigm shift.

Then we have the narration and visuals used in the advertisement itself. The first words are: "What makes us human? Collaboration. It's in our DNA." So does that mean that termites, ants, bees, and killer whales are human as well? Collaboration is sure as heck in their DNA.

Millie walks by a bicyclist in a wind tunnel and gives him a knowing glance while saying: "When we work together and build on each others' ideas, we can create amazing things." Sure, if I think about it long enough in abstract terms, I can appreciate the idea of unseen scientists off-screen somewhere, studying the wind tunnel results. But choosing a competitive cyclist as your focal image seems a strange choice… It's an iconic example of individual effort and achievement in sports.

A bit later in the ad, the narration doubles down on collaboration being used to "create amazing things and move… the world… forward." This just seems WAY too highfalutin' fer your average businessperson wanting to hold a meeting or give a presentation. Nobody buys collaboration software to move… the world… forward. They use it to take care of the day to day minutiae of business, one damned meeting at a time. Who is this concept supposed to appeal to?

It's finally time to hit the core value proposition… that sharing ideas and working with other people is beneficial. But the way it's sold in the ad is that if ONLY there were a theoretical way to accomplish such a crazy idea, "We would no longer feel isolated. We would no longer feel alone." Millie touches the chin of a little girl in a school uniform who seems positively catatonic in her lack of reaction to human touch. Again, I just feel like the ad has completely missed the pain point of its business audience. This isn't a therapy tool for shut-ins. The point of online web collaboration has to be about achieving goals or reducing lost time or being efficient or SOMETHING besides feeling better about your poor lonely existence!

Then comes a visual that makes me scratch my head in complete confusion… Millie stands in front of a group of faceless mannequins, all dressed in similar drab hoodies. She says "The more we work together, the more human we'll be." As she does this, she pulls her own hoodie over her head to look as much as possible like the motionless statues around her. Isn't that the exact OPPOSITE of what the script is trying to convey? Maybe this is a reference to Stranger Things… I never watched the show. But it is weird with a capital Q.

At the very end of the minute and a half ad, we finally learn what is being promoted. A simple text overlay shows us "Cisco Webex" while Millie says "This is Cisco Webex." But for some reason, the director had her pronounce it as if it were still being spelled the old way, with the accent on the final syllable and an implied capital E: "This is web-EX" -- If I were introducing new branding that changed the product label to a normally-capitalized word, I would want people to say it the way it is naturally written, emphasizing the single capital letter at the front: "WEBex."

Well, I'm not a B-to-B advertiser. Good luck to Cisco and I hope the new campaign stimulates more interest in web collaboration. It's good for all of us. Let's get out there and move… the world… forward!

May 17, 2018

I was asked to moderate a webinar recently featuring a guest speaker. The speaker was an expert in her field with many decades of experience presenting and leading workshops in her subject. She had never presented on a webinar and was somewhat nervous about the process.

The organizer of the event had apparently assuaged her fears by telling her, "Don't worry. It's just like standing in front of a room and giving a talk. You talk and you show your slides. Easy!"

By the time I got inserted into the process, the presenter had created a workshop-style talk that would have been dynamite in a classroom setting. She had workbooks prepared with long exercises laying out hypothetical study scenarios and lists of discussion questions. She asked me how we were going to distribute the workbooks to the students.

Unfortunately, this particular webinar had been set up as an ad-hoc session. Attendees did not have to preregister. The organizer sent out the join link and effectively said, "Show up online if you want to attend!" So there was no way to know who would be in attendance and no way to send out pre-event communications or materials.

I said that I could make the materials available for download in the session, but that I could not guarantee that attendees would be able to print them out. We often get attendees joining on mobile devices, and I knew of one group that regularly attended together while having drinks and appetizers at a local restaurant.

On the day of the webinar, she started the session by inviting each attendee in turn to open their microphone and tell us about themself. She spent time responding to each person and their experience level. This can be a nice way to start an in-person workshop or class where the attendees share a physical space and can see and relate to the person talking. Online, it quickly gets repetitive and slows down the crucial early portion of the proceedings where attendees are looking for an indication of value. Attendees do not feel the same sense of community and shared experience when they sit alone in front of a computer screen. I find that often a group chat works better as an ice-breaker and community-builder than sequential introductions. Everyone can see and respond at once, without having to wait for their turn in line and without feeling like they are caught in a spotlight.

Later in the session, she invited the audience members to open the document they had downloaded and read through the description. People did not know when to stop reading the 5-page exercise. She could not see them and we just sat in-session with about 6 minutes of silence. When we started the conversation again, it was difficult to get people back into an interactive and contributing frame of mind. They had become passive readers, rather than participating members in a discussion.

My rule of thumb in online sessions is to always minimize "dead air." Don't give attendees long reading assignments (through external materials or on-screen text). Chop reading into small "bite size" pieces. Each snippet should introduce a short, easily understood point that can be discussed before moving on to the next item.

While the mechanics of a webinar CAN be exactly the same as you would use for an in-room class or presentation, it works to your advantage to modify your approach for the online environment. Help your guest speakers to understand the key differences BEFORE they develop their materials, rather than forcing rewrites after everything is completed.

April 26, 2018

Some higher-priced webinar products have very sophisticated emailing capabilities that work quite well, so I do not want to damn the entire industry with a single broad brushstroke. But in too many cases, email functionality is not given enough design attention by the product development teams. After all, when you set out to build a web collaboration product, the in-session experience is foremost on your mind. But for the organizations that use web collaboration products, control over the emails that go out under their names are just as critical a concern.

Emails represent the company holding a web event. They get forwarded and they get retained. The impact of an improperly-handled email can potentially last longer than the impact of something going wrong inside a live webinar! It doesn't matter whether an event is intended for marketing, sales, corporate communications, customer training, partner relations, fund raising, or some other use… The communications surrounding the webinar need to reflect the brand, the image, and the professional integrity and reliability of the sender. And controlling that can be a challenge with some webinar products.

Here are some email design failures I see too often in web conferencing products. These are not in any particular priority order, as I think they are all important.

No ability to send test emails. Showing me a preview window is not sufficient. I want a real email sent to my choice of a receiving address so I can see it on different operating systems, different devices, check the "From" name and address, verify fonts, click links, and so on.

Adding anything about the webinar vendor. You don't get to piggyback your advertising on my emails. No "Powered by" or "Click here to find out more" footers tacked onto the end of my message. The email must represent my organization. You already have my money. Do your marketing through your own channels.

Hard-coded "From" and "Reply-to" fields. I want to be able to specify the name that people see the email coming from in their inbox. I also want to be able to change who gets replies - which can easily change from event to event. Don't make this a fixed field for the entire account.

Fixed text that is always inserted in the email. I love it when the software provides a starting template for an email. But I get to override everything. Some vendors only let you insert a block of text into the middle of their boilerplate template. That is inadequate. You don't get to determine what people see under my name and logo.

Inability to customize content after the event. Some technologies make you lock in your post-webinar send time and email text ahead of time, and once the event is over, you can't change them. We do a lot of work after our webinars conclude. Maybe hand-editing the recording and placing it on a server. Or getting materials ready for distribution. Let me make changes to content and scheduling for follow up emails after the event is over.

Inability to manually send further emails to registrants or attendees. Work on enough webinars, and eventually you will mess up something. Maybe a link to materials had a typo, or you misspelled the email address of a contact person. It is very handy if you can write a correction email and resend it to all recipients of the original message. I understand that webinar vendors don't want to turn into ad hoc bulk mailing services, but I think the utility of this feature in an emergency overrides the small risk of it being misused by an unscrupulous customer.

Inability to resend an email to an individual. If somebody doesn't receive their registration confirmation or instructions email (or loses it in an overstuffed inbox), it is sure nice to be able to click their name on a registration page and have the system resend the email. Extra points if the software allows you to type in an alternate email address for them as a way to work around delivery problems on their primary address.

In addition to the above problem cases, there are some extra "nice to have" features I always appreciate, but which are not critical functionality. Vendors get bonus points if they allow these enhancements:

Ability to fully customize HTML content in the email with tables, HTML formatting tags, links, and other standard HTML.

Ability to use a WYSIWYG visual editor to customize fonts, colors, links, indenting, numbering, and other HTML formatting in your emails without having to write the actual HTML code.

Ability to create a secondary text-only version of the emails for "multipart MIME" sends. This lets you exactly control what people see if they use text-only email readers, as are sometimes found on mobile devices. (This gets less important every year, but still exists as a thing.)

Ability to add file attachments to emails (this is VERY unusual, and I understand that it opens the door to intentional or unintentional misuse and security risks). Another option I have imagined - but have not seen - is the ability for the host to upload documents to the vendor's server and have the software automatically generate an access link that gets inserted in the email.

Ability to track open rates and bounceback statistics on all system-sent emails.

Ability for the system to send out follow up emails not at a specific time, but as soon as the system recording is available, with a link inserted into the emails.

System-generated time conversion link. For confirmation and reminder emails, add a web link that shows the start time in global time zones.

I think webinar vendors can do better at providing differentiation and extra value for their customers in this area. Let your vendor know you care, and definitely check out email functionality as part of your investigation and evaluation when choosing a new web conferencing product.

April 18, 2018

There are days when it is really hard to stay ahead of the curve. I just finished posting a big rant about WebEx Event Center functionality when my inbox was suddenly filled with news announcements and commentary about WebEx.

Cisco is betting hard on video meetings as the primary business application of the moment. If you go to the new Cisco Webex products page, you see an emphasis on Webex as a way to go "From meeting, to brainstorming, to sharing with the whole team." Today's press release shared that Cisco Spark is now rebranded as Webex Teams. Webex Meetings is now firmly focused on video meetings, with meeting participants "strongly encouraged" to turn on their camera upon entering an online session. The associated marketing image of the interface features 25 speakers (Cisco says you can now have up to 75 on-camera participants and up to 1000 viewers in a Webex Meeting).

Controls are now accessed through button icons arranged in a row at the bottom of the video image:

There was a conspicuous absence of any mention of the former WebEx Event Center or of webinar-oriented functionality on the new primary products page. I eventually clicked through to the sub-page for Cisco Webex Meetings and found a section at the bottom promoting Cisco Webex Events for audiences up to 3,000 participants and Cisco Webex Webcasting for broadcasting to as many as 40,000 viewers. So they have not killed off their events business, but it is unambiguously taking a back seat to the more casual videoconferencing idea. Webex Training and Webex Support are also listed as available products under the Webex Meetings umbrella.

When I clicked through to the new page for Webex Events, I found a few marketing screen shots that hinted at a significant product redesign. The window to record a meeting showed a larger and more obvious record button and an intriguing synthesized audio waveform display:

It also looks like they may have finally upgraded the woefully obsolete registration interface for events (although they need to fix the typo of "Pleace" in the middle of their image!)

I am looking forward to finding out more about the new product releases, as well as learning how Cisco plans to handle rollout to its large existing customer base. There is going to be quite a need for new training and support documentation to correspond to the redesigns in layout and operations. This may be a difficult transition for some administrators and corporate technology trainers, but the upgrades were overdue and I'm glad to see a significant product upgrade.

Here's yet another piece of archaic and senseless product design hanging around in WebEx, just waiting to undermine your efforts as a webinar host.

When you schedule a WebEx Event, you can configure follow up emails that will go out to event attendees and to registered no-shows. You can customize the subject line, the body, and what time the emails should be sent. So far, so good… Those are all desirable options and something I expect from any serious webinar product.

But once your event is over, you can no longer edit any of those settings. Let's say you created the bulk of your email body, but you were going to wait until your recording was ready and was hosted online so you could insert the proper access link. There is no way to get back into the settings and change the text. There is no way to update the send time to send your emails earlier, once you have things ready for use.

The only way to manually control things after the event is over is to run an Attendance Report in your WebEx account for the event and send the follow up emails explicitly. Here are the steps to follow…

1) Log in to your WebEx account

2) Click "My WebEx" at the top of the screen

3) Click "My Reports" in the left-hand column

4) Click "Attendance Report" in the middle of the page

5) Choose a date range and click "Display Report"

6) Find your desired completed event under "Event Name" (This report shows with a red caution message for up to 24-48 hours after your event, warning that it is only a preliminary report. I assume this means you should not trust its accuracy until then?)

7) Look to the right of your desired Event Name. There are hyperlinked numbers under "Attended" and "Absent." Click the number under "Attended"

8) Click the hyperlinked phrase "Thank-You" in the middle of the text on the resulting page. There is no explanation, but this opens up the email text editor.

9) Click "Edit" and make any desired changes to your thank you message

10) Click "Save" to save your edits

11) Click "OK" to use your saved email

12) Click "Send" to send the email to all event attendees

13) Click "Go Back" to return to the report listing page

14) Look to the right of your desired Event Name. Click the hyperlinked number under "Absent"

15) Click the hyperlinked phrase "Follow-Up" in the middle of the text on the resulting page. There is no explanation, but this opens up the email text editor.

16) Click "Edit" and make any desired changes to your absentee message

17) Click "Save" to save your edits

18) Click "OK" to use your saved email

19) Click "Send" to send the email to all event no-shows

According to the tech support representative I spoke to, this does NOT override any previously scheduled follow up emails you configured in the event itself. Those will still go out at the scheduled times. So unless you have a very good idea of exactly what you want to say and when you want it to be delivered, you should probably not schedule follow up emails in the event configuration. Using the manual edit and send process is clunky and slow, but ultimately gives you the control you would expect.

Let's review the product design…

Create the maximum number of clicks and intermediate steps possible.

Make the user search for action links in different parts of the screen at each stage of the process.

Include embedded hyperlinks in the middle of data and text displays that have no explanation of what happens when you click them.

Force long, repetitive sequences of operations to do similar actions.

Make some screens navigate back with a "Go Back" button, others with "OK or Cancel" and others with a navigation link at the top of the screen.

Don't provide any way to override or update previously scheduled system activities.

Back when I managed technical product design for commercial software, I would have fired an engineer who came up with this interface. WebEx has kept it around for more than a decade.

April 11, 2018

Here's a personal (and painful) learning experience I had that serves as a helpful reminder to always be careful about setting expectations as a webinar moderator.

I was working a client webinar as moderator. Our presenter was a guest from outside the organization who had spoken on at least five other webinars for us over the years. He and I had always worked well together and I thought he was well-versed and comfortable in our process.

This particular webinar was tricky, as it was being delivered in Spanish. I was using my rudimentary grade-school Spanish comprehension, Google Translate windows, and the assistance of our bilingual administrative team from the client to help me support the presenter and attendees. We had a very engaged and participatory audience, typing lots of questions.

The client organizer had asked me to make sure that we stayed on time, given the personable nature of the speaker and the highly interactive crowd. We had a ton of messages flowing through our private chat window, what with translations and team communications.

At the 30-minute mark, we seemed behind the curve on where we should be in the presentation, so I wrote to the speaker in all-caps: "30 MINUTES. WATCH TIME!"

The presenter wrote back in the private chat: "ok"

Then another team member from the client wrote "Remember to answer the questions at the end." The presenter stopped talking to the audience and wrote back "I know, stop writing."

At 40 minutes, I wrote: "40 MINUTE MARK"

The presenter again stopped talking to the audience and wrote to me: "Please stop, Ken. I know. Please."

I dutifully stopped bothering the presenter and we finished the webinar. Once he had finished his presentation, the speaker wrote to me again in the chat in a series of messages: "Ken, you just drove me nuts I'm sorry. I think it was extremely rude to write in CAPS. I have a big watch in front of me. You were so distracting."

During our spoken debrief afterwards, it became clear that he was well and truly angry with me, and he continued to point out my rudeness to me and to the client.

Going back over the chat log, I was struck by the fact that his perception was so strongly influenced by only two messages from me and one from the client coordinator. I was using a technique I had used with him (and explained) in the past, where I put important notices for the speaker in uppercase so he could quickly notice them as separate from the stream of other communications going on in the chat window. But I had not reinforced that concept before we started on this day. And so he took my reminders - intended as helpful assistance - as the online form of yelling.

I really felt badly that instead of making a presenter feel supported, I had instead made him feel persecuted and defensive. My takeaway was that no matter how many times I might support a presenter, I should never make assumptions. If I plan to use uppercase to make messages stand out, I need to reinforce that it's merely an attempt to make it easier to ignore the rest of the unimportant text going by. If I'm going to provide time marks along the way, make sure the speaker expects it and is comfortable knowing that it is supportive rather than accusatory.

My dad always used to tell me that "The burden of communications is on the communicator." It doesn't matter that I felt justified in my actions. I didn't communicate them clearly enough or set the proper expectations with my intended recipient. That led to misunderstanding and hurt feelings. As the originator of those communications, the burden was on me to establish the framework. I try to be more careful nowadays.